Very unstable powerbook, sleep problem

Question

I'm having a hard time figuring this one out. When I try to wake my power book from sleep, the pulsing led stops blinking and it appears to wake, but the screen will not turn on. After holding the power button to force a shut down, if I try to restart, I can hear the hard drive spinning but still nothing on the screen. The really weird part is when I run it in target mode, everything works fine, including the screen, which displays the blue screen with the fire wire logo. About one in every 10 restarts will boot normally, until the powebook sleeps, then the problem starts all over again. Thanks in advance for any help,
Don

Answer 1

I'm having a similar problem, but with the catch that my display is going to sleep even when the computer isn't. I've had a problem occasionally (i.e. not more than once a week, probably less than that) in the past with similar symptoms--the computer seems to wake based on lack of pulsing light and presence of audible hard drive activity, but the screen remains black. However, it's gotten worse lately, and the screen now goes black sometimes without the computer going to sleep. If I then close the lid (to put the computer to sleep), open it and hit a few keys to wake the computer, I get the screen to come back on about 50% of the time. The only thing I've found to work consistently is to SSH in (I've turned remote access on specifically to deal with this issue), issue a 'sudo pmset force displaysleep 1', wait over a minute, and issue a 'sudo pmset force displaysleep 0'. (pmset is the command-line utility to control sleep behavior) I haven't found anything that will allow me to issue a "wake up now, dang it!" command, so the pmset drill (setting display sleep time to one minute, waiting more than a minute, and setting it to zero) is the only way I've found to deal with it. However, it's getting really freaking annoying at this point, as the workaround means at least a minute of downtime each time it happens.